Thursday, September 6, 2012

The Liberal Way to Run the World: “Improve” or We’ll Kill You

By John Pilger

Global Research, September 05, 2012: What is the world’s
most powerful and violent “ism”? The question will summon the usual
demons, such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The
answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only “superficially recorded, let alone
documented, let alone acknowledged,” because only one ideology claims to
be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is
liberalism.

In his 1859 essay, On Liberty,
to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mills described the
power of empire. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in
dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “provided the end be their
improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”
The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit
obedience” was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also
believed in the bloody conquest of others as “a triumph of Christianity
and civilization” that was “clearly pre-ordained in the sight of
Providence.”

“It’s a nice and convenient
myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the
warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the
imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its
open-ended nature — its conviction that it represents a superior form of
life [while denying its] self-righteous fanaticism.” He had in mind a
speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks,
in which Blair promised to “reorder this world around us” according to
his “moral values.” At least a million dead later – in Iraq alone – this
tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan
for a fee of $13 million.